Archive for March, 2016

“The central function of the tax office has evolved from strategy and planning into risk management”, says William Byrnes, professor of law and associate dean at Texas A&M University. Read Full Report here E&Y tax industry report

E&Y reports that “According to a 2015 report by the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA), which launched a Competency Crisis website to deal with the talent gap in 2013, 90% of North American organizations cannot find the entry-level management accounting and finance talent they need.”

“The educational curriculum isn’t keeping up with the needs of business, and employers expect more advanced skills at entry level, according to the report.”

E&Y finds: “Texas A&M University is among the pioneers of change in tax education. …the State of Texas not only established a new law school at the university but also gave it carte blanche to create a new education model.”

The LexisNexis® Guide to FATCA Compliance provides a framework for meaningful interactions among enterprise stakeholders, and between the FATCA Compliance Officer and theFATCA advisors/vendors. Analysis of the complicated regulations, recognition of overlapping complex regime and intergovernmental agreement requirements (e.g. FATCA, Qualified Intermediary, source withholding, national and international information exchange, European Union tax information exchange, information confidentiality laws, money laundering prevention, risk management, and the application of an IGA) is balanced with substantive analysis and descriptive examples. The contributors hail from several countries and an offshore financial center and include attorneys, accountants, information technology engineers, and risk managers from large, medium and small firms and from large financial institutions. Thus, the challenges of the FATCA Compliance Officer are approached from several perspectives and contextual backgrounds.

Several new contributing authors joined the FATCA Expert Contributor team this fourth edition. This fourth edition has been expanded by 19 new chapters and from a total of 54 to 73 chapters, with over 500 new pages of regulatory and compliance analysis based upon industry feedback of internal challenges with systems implementation. The previous 54 chapters have been substantially updated and expanded, including many more practical examples to assist a compliance officer contextualize the regulations, IGA provisions, and national rules enacted pursuant to an IGA. The new chapters include by example an in-depth analysis of designing a FATCA internal policy that is compliant with the initial two year soft enforcement initiative, designing an equivalent form to the W-8, reporting accounts, reporting payments, operational specificity of the mechanisms of information capture, management and exchange by firms and between countries, insights as to the application of FATCA and the IGAs within new BRIC and European country chapters, and a project management schedule for the compliance officer.

Like this:

Haven’t sat down with Kat in couple years (she’s the nation’s leading tax recruiter, all the big companies and Big 4 hiring partners know her), but she wrote this entertaining and highlydescriptive story yesterday to her 100,000 tax folks worldwide that leverage her tax recruitment site.

“… What I shall never forget was the experience that summer day in 2007 in an old dilapidated building. There I was sitting in a wobbly old chair to the right side of a scholarly, forward thinking tax law Professor sitting in front of a computer that looked like the very first “Lisa” computer that Steve Jobs built. Although it was probably not that one, it sure looked like it! The old computer had loose wires hooked up to another old computer with a video fixture added to the mix of wires and computer equipment. I sat there next to Professor Byrnes and experienced my very first distance course with students from Asia, South Africa, Brazil, Europe, U.S. and some other countries. It was fascinating to observe him teaching his tax students online from multiple countries. The experience in this old building with old computers hooked together with loose wires in what appeared to look like an old scientist experiment had me thinking privately… ”

From when I started in 1994 until recently, technology and education had been totally disconnected, so much so that I had to build my own computers and servers from parts I scavenged from the computer lab discarded machines, like old Gateways and IBMs, because faculty administration would not budget for technology build out for a professor. Anyway – blast from the past that I thought may be interesting to anyone in tax education.